Dr Laura Toni talk Invitation: Wednesday 26th April at 2pm

Speaker: Dr Laura Toni, Lecturer University College London

Venue: Large Conference Room, O’Reilly Institute

Date & Time: Wednesday 26th April at 2pm

Title: Navigation-Aware Communications for Interactive Multiview Video Systems

Abstract: Recent advances in video technology have moved the research toward novel interactive Multiview services, such as 360-degree videos, and virtual reality, where users can actively interact with the scene. Because of their interactivity, users are no longer seen as mere terminals interconnected by links but active players in the communication with all possible levels of interactivity: from passively consuming contents, to actively crafting ones own media stream and social experience. This user-centric paradigm calls for adaptation of streaming policies to both the nature of the content of the communication and the social dynamics among users to face the astonishing diversity of novel networks.

In this talk, we will provide an overview on adaptive communication paradigms that need to be designed to cope with both the massive traffic of Multiview data and the interactivity level of the users. Then, we will describe in more details novel navigation-aware frameworks for optimal coding, streaming, and Multiview processing in adaptive streaming processes. We conclude with a perspective on open challenges in the field on 360-videos, stressing in particular the need to learn in real time users’ behaviours to optimally design future interactive streaming systems

Speaker Bio: Laura Toni received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering, from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 2005 and 2009, respectively. In 2007, she was a visiting scholar at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), CA, and since 2009, she has been a frequent visitor to the UCSD, working on media coding and streaming technologies.

Between 2009 and 2011, she worked at the Tele-Robotics and Application (TERA) department at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), investigating wireless sensor networks for robotics applications. In 2012, she was a Post-doctoral fellow at the UCSD and between 2013 and 2016 she was a Post-doctoral fellow in the Signal Processing Laboratory (LTS4) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland.

Since July 2016, she has been appointed as Lecturer in the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department of University College London (UCL), UK.

Her research mainly involves interactive multimedia systems, decision-making strategies under uncertainty, large-scale signal processing and communications.